It is time for Major League Baseball umpires to stop calling balls and strikes

Having umpires call balls and strikes is one of the most
fundamental aspects of both the game of baseball and the
profession of Major League Baseball umpires. But as we get better
at recognizing what is really a strike it is becoming painfully
obvious that it is time for the umps to give up the
responsibility.

However, as the title implies, while the umps are better they are
still not very good.

The data revealed to Davis and Lopez that the average umpire had
an accuracy rate of slightly more than 83% in 2008 when calling
balls in strikes. That accuracy quickly improved and is now at
86% now that umpires can more accurately see which pitches they
are getting right and more importantly, the pitches they get
wrong.

But while the umpires have gotten better, the data also
reveals two glaring problems once you look past the general
improvement.

1. Umpires are still getting a lot of pitches
wrong.

While 86% is better than 83%, that still means the
average umpire is wrong on 14% of the pitches and
even the best umpire is still missing more than 10% of the calls.
Over the course of an entire game that is a LOT of missed calls.

According to Fangraphs,
the average MLB game this season has 288 pitches. Of those
pitches, batters swing 46.7% of the time meaning umpires are
responsible for calling ball or strike approximately 154 times a
game.

Considering 14% of balls and strikes calls are wrong,
umpires are wrong 21-22 times per game on average. That's not
good. Over the course of a full season, umpires are
wrong more than 50,000 times. That's even worse.

Now consider that not all pitches are borderline balls and
strikes. That means their error rate on close pitches is probably
a lot higher than 14%.

No wonder players are always so angry.

Greg
Fiume/Getty Images

2. Umpires may not be able to get any better without more
help.

The umpires have improved. So that means they can continue to
improve and maybe someday they will reach a more acceptable
level, say 95% accuracy, right? Maybe not.

While PITCHf/x data shows that the umpires have improved since
2008, that improvement appears to have peaked and leveled off.
The accuracy level for the last three years has hovered around
86% and even dipped a little bit from 2013 to 2014.

This suggests that, even with the PITCHf/x assistance, under
current conditions, umpires will continue to miss 14% of their
balls and strikes calls until they get even more help.

Ed
Zurga/Getty Images

Technology already exists to assist umpires but so far
MLB has shunned it.

One of the biggest driving forces for the addition of instant
replay to MLB in the last few years was that technology had
gotten to the point where fans could easily see all the calls
umpires were missing.

Sports have a huge problem when fans can more accurately make a
call at home than an official can make at the game. It should
never happen and yet, that's where we are with balls and strikes.

As we can see every Sunday on ESPN with their "K-Zone,"
technology exists that can instantaneously show whether a pitch
was in the strike zone or not.

ESPN

While this is a just a 2-dimensional plane and the actual zone is
in three dimensions, a spokesperson for ESPN told Business
Insider that K-Zone does have the ability to view the strike zone
in three dimensions and will register a pitch a strike if it
misses the 2-dimensional plane but does hit the zone at some
point. Obviously, this would be a rare occurance.

The problem comes with how to display that on television.

One way to get around this is the 3-dimensional K-Zone
introduced by ESPN earlier this year.

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ESPN

This version of the K-Zone is not instantaneous but it can be
generated within a few seconds. In theory, Major League Baseball
could easily use the K-Zone and PITCHf/x as a way to
instantaneously judge pitches and then use the 3-dimensional
view for television viewers as needed.

Umpires calling balls and strikes is a part of baseball. But
until recently we didn't know just how bad they are at it.
Despite recent improvement, umpires are still getting it wrong
more than 50,000 times each season. That is too much, it is not
going to get better, and there is a way to get the calls
right.